In Texas last week, a man wore a Make America Great Again hat inside a polling location in San Antonio. Asked to remove it, the man allegedly ended up throwing several punches at a 69-year-old election worker.
Fortunately, the local precinct worker wasn’t seriously injured, and the suspect was arrested. But the incident served as a timely reminder about the kind of conditions election workers are facing in the United States this year. The New York Times reported on the “rising wave of threats to election workers.”
On Monday, the Justice Department unsealed a complaint against a man in Philadelphia who had vowed to skin alive and kill a party official recruiting volunteer poll watchers. On Tuesday, the police in Tempe, Ariz., arrested a man in connection with shootings at a Democratic campaign office, which resulted in no injuries, and other acts of political vandalism. On Wednesday, prosecutors charged a 61-year-old man from Tampa, Fla., with threatening an election official — on top of pending charges over menacing messages sent in the past five years. And on Thursday, police officers in Phoenix arrested a person in connection with a mailbox fire, damaging some 20 ballots in a Democratic stronghold.
“Our elections are made possible by the hard work and patriotism of election workers in communities across the country who are also our neighbors, relatives and friends, and they deserve to do this important work without being subjected to threats,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement last week. “The fact that election workers need to be worried about their security is incomprehensible and unacceptable.”
That’s true, but these are nevertheless the circumstances we find ourselves in as Americans in 2024. NBC News published a report last week noting that election officials nationwide are ramping up their security measures at polling places, “from beefing up law enforcement presence to donning bulletproof vests to deploying drones for surveillance amid an increasingly hostile environment.”
A few days earlier, The Wall Street Journal published a report out of Maricopa County, Arizona, where the local election headquarters “has become a fortress.” On Election Day, as workers tabulate ballots behind new fencing and concrete barriers, drones will patrol the skies overhead, police snipers will perch on rooftops and mounted patrols will stand ready. Across the state, election workers have gone through active-shooter drills and learned to barricade themselves or wield fire hoses to repel armed mobs. At the ready are trauma kits containing tourniquets and bandages designed to pack chest wounds and stanch serious bleeding.
It’s difficult to fully appreciate the degree to which Donald Trump has poisoned American politics, but these reports are a good place to start. As Rachel noted via Threads, highlighting the report out of Arizona, “Pop this in the time capsule for when it comes time to tell future generations about how awesome the Republican Party’s Trump years were.”
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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